When enough people who actually vote get mad that the politicians lose the ability to slice them into districts where their vote doesn't matter, then things will change.
My vote doesn't matter. My district is split 70/30. It doesn't matter WHICH side I vote for. Sure, I vote anyway- my vote has mattered exactly once in the last 12 years (even then I was was one of 31 voters and the incumbent refused to accept such a close vote for about six months of litigation).
The best thing that could happen for this country is for abortion to be overturned. Because as long as 30% of the voters vote that one issue, many other issues like this, dmca, surveillence cameras, politicians raising our taxes 10% per YEAR for the last 5 years with complete impunity because they are anti-abortion, are going to continue.
In the end, money matters. And voters no longer have enough to spare to contribute enough to get politicians attention.
We are talking about a philosophical point. It doesn't matter if -most- pregnancies don't end in death today. The point is that if -one- pregnancy will end in death for both the mother and child and we were under "no abortion under any circumstances" then the result would be the death of both.
Thinking about it, no there is a distinct difference between kissing your wife and either having sex with birth control or male masturbation unless you ejaculate when you kiss your wife.
The part about time vs skill is a good point. Just sitting on your butt shouldn't entitle you to things. Unfortunately- skill games are too hard for the majority of people. Selling a game based purely on twitch skills appeals to a smaller market.
The part about solo vs guild play is just whining tho. In the real world, there are many activities that a single person cannot do as well as a group. Maintaining the logistics and politics of a guild for encounters and administration is a major challenge and develops useful real world skills. Running a guild is too hard for most people- but being a member of a guild usually isn't.
If you don't like mmorggs that center around guild activites, then DON'T PLAY THEM. Go play a game that focuses on solo or small group play. I admit that WOW advertised it would be such a game at the start and isn't any more.
But to join guild play with some kind of screed about the noble value of skill play is stupid- obviously you lack the social SKILL to prosper in guild settings and need to work on that SKILL.
The church had strong objections to "spilling your seed" through masturbation and has to birth control. I'm not coming out of left field here.
I don't personally believe either. I believe abortion is unresolvable but should definately be allowed in some cases and up to some point even if the mother's life is not in danger. I think we have millions of starving, dying children who are already alive that we should work on first.
Remember the church opposed masturbation since it was spilling seed. They also are against many forms of birth control.
They were somewhat logically consistent. And already in line with the thought that a preventing a conception that would have otherwise naturally occured is roughly the same ethically as killing the unborn.
(What they didn't know is that if you don't use the seed it dies fairly quickly anyway).
Hmm. I like most of your post. But it seems to me that the extremes are easier to prove conclusively wrong.
i.e. Abortion is illegal under ANY circumstances. Okay the mother AND the child will die when she is about 7 months pregnant.
Abortion is legal under ANY circumstances. Okay we are killing an 8 month old baby that could survive outside the womb.
So the middle ground must be where the correct answer lies or there may be -no- correct answer. Heads you lose, Tails you lose.
If you get down to it, even if you use birth control prevent the union of sperm and egg that would have occured- you just prevented a human life. Maybe not violently but just as surely as if you had aborted it at 8 months.
As long as money has a large impact on the justice system then libertarian societies would break down. The only way we can keep this from happening is to prevent situations where a person with a billion dollars can simply bleed the other person/company try through lawsuits and/or keep postponing/preventing resolution of cases against themselves indefinately.
I think libertarian philosphy handles minor variations in personal power but fails when some members of society become to powerful in relation to the rest. Since no part of liberarian philosophy involves restricting to amount of money and power a corporation or person can have, then it is inevitable that such a person will arise (and probably would arise even if there were restrictions). Once that happens, you don't really have a libertarian society any more- you really have a noble class who have special legal privileges, and then you have everyone else.
I was pretty libertarian until I realized that it seriously breaks down when you have to pay for legal issues and some people get too much money. A sufficiently rich person or corporation can do just about anything they want to most people and keep it tied up in court forever.
The only way for libertarian philosophy to work in the real world is to view efficient high quality legal services as one of the essential (and hence- free) services of government or to limit the total amount of money/power that any one person/company can acquire (and then tax the hell out of every dollar after that limit).
If I have enough money I can destroy your house, kill your dog, and just about anything else I want and only pay fines or keep things tied up in court pretty much forever. That is the failure of the libertarian philosophy.
I.e., if you are in nevada, atlantic city, in a casino anywhere, then you can log on and gamble at these sites. What you can't do is log on someplace where gambling is illegal. This is easy enough to track via IP address. You can have a list of IP's where it is legal to gamble from.
Then the law is fair.
Of course it is also stupid since you can still log on to a redirector service and make it look like you are coming from a place where it is legal.
But legally, I think the WTO couldn't complain. Otherwise all kinds of physical location laws go out the window. (course this begs the question of, are my morals supposed to be constrained by the morals of the most conservative hamlet in the entire world?)
Not really just put in Hemp Diesel into google and you will find a lot of people are thinking along these lines.
Hemp has a lot of uses besides being a drug but it was demonized by the Hearst newspaper syndicate because hemp paper competed with tree pulp paper. Hearst had a large financial interest in the success of tree pulp paper.
There are over a hundred varieties of hemp and many of them have very low concentration of drug material. Several varieties grow quickly, produce a lot of oil or fiber depending on how you plant them, while not taking very much out of the soil.
I have read, we could meet all of americas fuel needs if we would plant kansas in hemp. Some varieties produce a lot of oil and you can get 4 harvests per year.
You can also make paper from hemp (saving a lot of trees- and there are implications that part of the reason hemp was demonized to begin with was that it conflicted with Hearst's Dupont interests (they developed the way to make paper from tree fiber but had competition from hemp paper).
Hemp oil + steam engines are very efficient and produce very tiny amounts of pollutants which are very simple because of the low temp burning conditions.
We could change over to this in as little as five years so there is not a lot to worry about with regard to running out of ground oil except where it has unique properties not offered by vegetable oils.
I frequently read that $6 a gallon is the point where oil becomes unneeded because there will be so many alternatives at that price. And that is why the current oil guys don't want oil to expensive- the last time they let it get too pricy, it collapsed down to almost $10 a barrel (a mere ten years ago roughly).
You are almost there... Now take one step more. Once you have a population that survives sneezing, the next step is a version that encourages sneezing to be more common so it reproduces faster than the non-sneezing variety.
The claim that 'Islam encourages the development of science and technology', is a classical example of Taqiyya , ie a statement which is known to be the opposite of the truth. (The taqiyya dispensation allows, and indeed encourages Muslims to lie to Unbelievers)
TAQIYYA (sometimes spelled TAQQIYYA or TAQIYA) is the duty of Muslims to lie about the beliefs, methods and objectives of Islam to non-Muslims. [TAQIYYA_1, TAQIYYA_2, TAQIYYA_3, TAQQIYA_4 , TAQIYA_5, TAQIYYA_6].
Taqiyya (bad faith, deceit, contempt for the truth, false promises, evasion, deceptive moderation and crocodile tears for terrorist victims) negates any attempt at interfaith dialogue between Islam and other belief systems, because we infidels never know whether we're being told a pack of lies.
In Islam it's OK to lie and deceive Kafirs (infidels) because Islam is in a permanent state of war with all non-Muslims and deception is a legitimate tactic. The word or promise of a Muslim to a Kafir counts for nothing in the eyes of Allah.
There goes a saying of the prophet of Islam that 'to lie is one of the major sins and Allah will hold you accountable, with the exception of these three' (in other words, in these three situations you can lie as much as you need to and Allah will not even blink): '(1) with your women; (2) in espionage jihad when you are a minority; and (3) in maintaining peace.' Thus the end justifies the means. (References)
There are many references to this- it's not a secret. ---
So HOW can I trust ANYTHING an islamic person says? It's okay for them to lie to me.
I don't believe in the existence of gods- but I do believe christians who follow their bible feel bad and shameful to lie to other people of any belief system. I trust christians in a way I can never trust islamic followers.
Hell as many posts here have revealed- there are NUMEROUS examples of mohammad artwork- including BY islamic artists and OF his face.
Sir, A widely circulated piece of art has a statue of christ dying on the cross submerged in piss. The artist, museums, and backers of this art are all alive and well last I heard- no one has assembled to burn down their property (and best of my knowledge chrisians in other countries didn't assemble to destroy american embassies because of it either).
They were really big on killing and punishing adulterers (even up to the 1800's) .
Even if they were non-believers.
Don't get me wrong- I personally think islam is much worse- I'm just saying there's a scripture supporting offing adulterers (who may not feel they are sinning at all).
Oddly not a lot of scripture against incest and some for it- guess it wasn't much of a problem.
Yes you can have those exact thought experiments and post them here on the web and people are not going to swear a jihad against you and kill you.
Why?
Because you have freedom of speech.
As for the rest, you are extending what is happening to a small group of muslims to the entire population of islams.
Okay- islamic wacko's blew up young kids dancing in Bali. Using your extension to me, I also have a right to take whatever bloody vengence against islamic people I want anywhere in the world. Oh wait, that sounds INSANE? Sure it does. The islamic people in saudi arabia have no justification to go aroung killing thousands of random people throughout the world because there is a problem in isreal/palestine.
And personally, I think the arabian tyrants have had as much of a hand in keeping the palestinian problem brewing as the west. They NEED an external enemy to prevent being killed by their own people.
My lunchmate today said she changed her opinion very strongly against islam in general because of this incident.
Amazing that bombs and so on don't do it- but freedom of speech is really sacred and a basis of our society. If islam is incompatable with free speech, then it is incompatible with a mixed society.
I can say SCREW JESUS or JESUS SHAVES (with a picture of jesus clean-shaven). I can say mohammad was a misogynist asshole who believed it was okay to lie to non-islamic people and wrote a book with great details on how to kill them. I can say the jews engaged in rape of young women in the towns they conquered. I can say scientology is a huge scam based on a bet between two science fiction authors. I can say the government is corrupt and owned by corporations.
I can say all these things because of free speech.
It is the fundamental thing that lets me work on a project with a mixture of chinese, indians, muslims, jewish, etc. We do the work, we get paid, we go home and do our own thing and believe our own way about the world.
This group wants to home school their children and teach them that evolution is false and that group wants to teach that vitamins are good or bad. It only works because regardless of how we disagree with each other, we have a fundamental understanding that we can't tell each other what to do, how to believe, and we can't kill people who we disagree with or destroy their property or we are going to be put down like a mad dog.
I think every free paper in the world should run those cartoons tomorrow. Keep running them for a month if that is what it takes to either bring this thing to a head or wear out the demonstrators.
Slashdot Mirror
kind of funny and insightful about the differences between real property (an AK-10) and "intellectual" property.
When enough people who actually vote get mad that the politicians lose the ability to slice them into districts where their vote doesn't matter, then things will change.
My vote doesn't matter. My district is split 70/30. It doesn't matter WHICH side I vote for. Sure, I vote anyway- my vote has mattered exactly once in the last 12 years (even then I was was one of 31 voters and the incumbent refused to accept such a close vote for about six months of litigation).
The best thing that could happen for this country is for abortion to be overturned. Because as long as 30% of the voters vote that one issue, many other issues like this, dmca, surveillence cameras, politicians raising our taxes 10% per YEAR for the last 5 years with complete impunity because they are anti-abortion, are going to continue.
In the end, money matters. And voters no longer have enough to spare to contribute enough to get politicians attention.
There was a pretty good SF book about a jet that went back to WWI.
Most of its official weaponry was useless.
Biplanes are too slow and too cold for missiles to target.
However, they didn't do to well with sonic boom jet wash.
We are talking about a philosophical point. It doesn't matter if -most- pregnancies don't end in death today. The point is that if -one- pregnancy will end in death for both the mother and child and we were under "no abortion under any circumstances" then the result would be the death of both.
Thinking about it, no there is a distinct difference between kissing your wife and either having sex with birth control or male masturbation unless you ejaculate when you kiss your wife.
The part about time vs skill is a good point.
Just sitting on your butt shouldn't entitle you to things. Unfortunately- skill games are too hard for the majority of people. Selling a game based purely on twitch skills appeals to a smaller market.
The part about solo vs guild play is just whining tho.
In the real world, there are many activities that a single person cannot do as well as a group. Maintaining the logistics and politics of a guild for encounters and administration is a major challenge and develops useful real world skills. Running a guild is too hard for most people- but being a member of a guild usually isn't.
If you don't like mmorggs that center around guild activites, then DON'T PLAY THEM. Go play a game that focuses on solo or small group play. I admit that WOW advertised it would be such a game at the start and isn't any more.
But to join guild play with some kind of screed about the noble value of skill play is stupid- obviously you lack the social SKILL to prosper in guild settings and need to work on that SKILL.
The church had strong objections to "spilling your seed" through masturbation and has to birth control. I'm not coming out of left field here.
I don't personally believe either. I believe abortion is unresolvable but should definately be allowed in some cases and up to some point even if the mother's life is not in danger. I think we have millions of starving, dying children who are already alive that we should work on first.
Remember the church opposed masturbation since it was spilling seed. They also are against many forms of birth control.
They were somewhat logically consistent. And already in line with the thought that a preventing a conception that would have otherwise naturally occured is roughly the same ethically as killing the unborn.
(What they didn't know is that if you don't use the seed it dies fairly quickly anyway).
Hmm.
I like most of your post.
But it seems to me that the extremes are easier to prove conclusively wrong.
i.e.
Abortion is illegal under ANY circumstances.
Okay the mother AND the child will die when she is about 7 months pregnant.
Abortion is legal under ANY circumstances.
Okay we are killing an 8 month old baby that could survive outside the womb.
So the middle ground must be where the correct answer lies or there may be -no- correct answer. Heads you lose, Tails you lose.
If you get down to it, even if you use birth control prevent the union of sperm and egg that would have occured- you just prevented a human life. Maybe not violently but just as surely as if you had aborted it at 8 months.
I think he probably said
The challenge 'of our' perception
and they misheard it as
The challenge 'over' perception.
I don't think there is any confusion.
As long as money has a large impact on the justice system then libertarian societies would break down. The only way we can keep this from happening is to prevent situations where a person with a billion dollars can simply bleed the other person/company try through lawsuits and/or keep postponing/preventing resolution of cases against themselves indefinately.
I think libertarian philosphy handles minor variations in personal power but fails when some members of society become to powerful in relation to the rest.
Since no part of liberarian philosophy involves restricting to amount of money and power a corporation or person can have, then it is inevitable that such a person will arise (and probably would arise even if there were restrictions). Once that happens, you don't really have a libertarian society any more- you really have a noble class who have special legal privileges, and then you have everyone else.
I was pretty libertarian until I realized that it seriously breaks down when you have to pay for legal issues and some people get too much money. A sufficiently rich person or corporation can do just about anything they want to most people and keep it tied up in court forever.
The only way for libertarian philosophy to work in the real world is to view efficient high quality legal services as one of the essential (and hence- free) services of government or to limit the total amount of money/power that any one person/company can acquire (and then tax the hell out of every dollar after that limit).
If I have enough money I can destroy your house, kill your dog, and just about anything else I want and only pay fines or keep things tied up in court pretty much forever. That is the failure of the libertarian philosophy.
I.e., if you are in nevada, atlantic city, in a casino anywhere, then you can log on and gamble at these sites. What you can't do is log on someplace where gambling is illegal. This is easy enough to track via IP address. You can have a list of IP's where it is legal to gamble from.
Then the law is fair.
Of course it is also stupid since you can still log on to a redirector service and make it look like you are coming from a place where it is legal.
But legally, I think the WTO couldn't complain. Otherwise all kinds of physical location laws go out the window. (course this begs the question of, are my morals supposed to be constrained by the morals of the most conservative hamlet in the entire world?)
Not really just put in Hemp Diesel into google and you will find a lot of people are thinking along these lines.
Hemp has a lot of uses besides being a drug but it was demonized by the Hearst newspaper syndicate because hemp paper competed with tree pulp paper. Hearst had a large financial interest in the success of tree pulp paper.
There are over a hundred varieties of hemp and many of them have very low concentration of drug material. Several varieties grow quickly, produce a lot of oil or fiber depending on how you plant them, while not taking very much out of the soil.
I have read, we could meet all of americas fuel needs if we would plant kansas in hemp. Some varieties produce a lot of oil and you can get 4 harvests per year.
You can also make paper from hemp (saving a lot of trees- and there are implications that part of the reason hemp was demonized to begin with was that it conflicted with Hearst's Dupont interests (they developed the way to make paper from tree fiber but had competition from hemp paper).
Hemp oil + steam engines are very efficient and produce very tiny amounts of pollutants which are very simple because of the low temp burning conditions.
We could change over to this in as little as five years so there is not a lot to worry about with regard to running out of ground oil except where it has unique properties not offered by vegetable oils.
I frequently read that $6 a gallon is the point where oil becomes unneeded because there will be so many alternatives at that price. And that is why the current oil guys don't want oil to expensive- the last time they let it get too pricy, it collapsed down to almost $10 a barrel (a mere ten years ago roughly).
You are almost there...
Now take one step more.
Once you have a population that survives sneezing, the next step is a version that encourages sneezing to be more common so it reproduces faster than the non-sneezing variety.
search for "piss christ" "elephant shit madonna".
plenty of cartoons of jesus in various humorous degrading situations too. (I guess you've never heard of south park).
none of those artists have been marked for death by the baptists or the catholic church last I heard.
Here is my basic problem with Islam.
...
http://www.geocities.com/scimah/idols.htm#TAQIYYA
The claim that 'Islam encourages the development of science and technology', is a classical example of Taqiyya , ie a statement which is known to be the opposite of the truth. (The taqiyya dispensation allows, and indeed encourages Muslims to lie to Unbelievers)
TAQIYYA (sometimes spelled TAQQIYYA or TAQIYA) is the duty of Muslims to lie about the beliefs, methods and objectives of Islam to non-Muslims. [TAQIYYA_1, TAQIYYA_2, TAQIYYA_3, TAQQIYA_4 , TAQIYA_5, TAQIYYA_6].
Taqiyya (bad faith, deceit, contempt for the truth, false promises, evasion, deceptive moderation and crocodile tears for terrorist victims) negates any attempt at interfaith dialogue between Islam and other belief systems, because we infidels never know whether we're being told a pack of lies.
In Islam it's OK to lie and deceive Kafirs (infidels) because Islam is in a permanent state of war with all non-Muslims and deception is a legitimate tactic. The word or promise of a Muslim to a Kafir counts for nothing in the eyes of Allah.
So taqiyya means that the only time you can be sure that a Mullah is telling the truth is when he says he's lying!
http://answering-islam.org/Terrorism/agenda.html
There goes a saying of the prophet of Islam that 'to lie is one of the major sins and Allah will hold you accountable, with the exception of these three' (in other words, in these three situations you can lie as much as you need to and Allah will not even blink): '(1) with your women; (2) in espionage jihad when you are a minority; and (3) in maintaining peace.' Thus the end justifies the means. (References)
There are many references to this- it's not a secret.
---
So HOW can I trust ANYTHING an islamic person says? It's okay for them to lie to me.
I don't believe in the existence of gods- but I do believe christians who follow their bible feel bad and shameful to lie to other people of any belief system. I trust christians in a way I can never trust islamic followers.
Hell as many posts here have revealed- there are NUMEROUS examples of mohammad artwork- including BY islamic artists and OF his face.
I paid 50 cents for coke at a restaurant back then- I pay $2.00 now.
I paid about 15 cents a can- I pay about 25 cents now- clearly coke has gotten a lot cheaper.
Inflation is why you really want to buy a house.
Sir,
A widely circulated piece of art has a statue of christ dying on the cross submerged in piss.
The artist, museums, and backers of this art are all alive and well last I heard- no one has assembled to burn down their property (and best of my knowledge chrisians in other countries didn't assemble to destroy american embassies because of it either).
No actually, that's a pretty close example to the islamic situation. The cartoonists are commiting blasphemy against mohammud.
And christians in the west wouldn't think of killing someone for blasphemy against god these days (tho they might if they got too much power again).
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
They were really big on killing and punishing adulterers (even up to the 1800's) .
Even if they were non-believers.
Don't get me wrong- I personally think islam is much worse- I'm just saying there's a scripture supporting offing adulterers (who may not feel they are sinning at all).
Oddly not a lot of scripture against incest and some for it- guess it wasn't much of a problem.
Yes you can have those exact thought experiments and post them here on the web and people are not going to swear a jihad against you and kill you.
Why?
Because you have freedom of speech.
As for the rest, you are extending what is happening to a small group of muslims to the entire population of islams.
Okay- islamic wacko's blew up young kids dancing in Bali. Using your extension to me, I also have a right to take whatever bloody vengence against islamic people I want anywhere in the world. Oh wait, that sounds INSANE? Sure it does. The islamic people in saudi arabia have no justification to go aroung killing thousands of random people throughout the world because there is a problem in isreal/palestine.
And personally, I think the arabian tyrants have had as much of a hand in keeping the palestinian problem brewing as the west. They NEED an external enemy to prevent being killed by their own people.
I think the "Piss christ" and "shit christ" things have to cut about as hard as you can cut and rabid christians didn't swear to kill the artists.
You are not the only one.
My lunchmate today said she changed her opinion very strongly against islam in general because of this incident.
Amazing that bombs and so on don't do it- but freedom of speech is really sacred and a basis of our society. If islam is incompatable with free speech, then it is incompatible with a mixed society.
I can say SCREW JESUS or JESUS SHAVES (with a picture of jesus clean-shaven).
I can say mohammad was a misogynist asshole who believed it was okay to lie to non-islamic people and wrote a book with great details on how to kill them.
I can say the jews engaged in rape of young women in the towns they conquered.
I can say scientology is a huge scam based on a bet between two science fiction authors.
I can say the government is corrupt and owned by corporations.
I can say all these things because of free speech.
It is the fundamental thing that lets me work on a project with a mixture of chinese, indians, muslims, jewish, etc. We do the work, we get paid, we go home and do our own thing and believe our own way about the world.
This group wants to home school their children and teach them that evolution is false and that group wants to teach that vitamins are good or bad. It only works because regardless of how we disagree with each other, we have a fundamental understanding that we can't tell each other what to do, how to believe, and we can't kill people who we disagree with or destroy their property or we are going to be put down like a mad dog.
I think every free paper in the world should run those cartoons tomorrow. Keep running them for a month if that is what it takes to either bring this thing to a head or wear out the demonstrators.